Dr. Carl Foster is an Exercise Physiologist in the Department of Exercise & Sports Science. He has published close to 500 clinical papers on clinical physiology including 'Prevention, Diagnosis & Treatment of Over-training syndrome: Joint Consensus Statement'. Following a quote from Shona Halson 'There's a belief out there that you can't over-train, you can only under-recover', Carl dives into this training trap that slowly morphs into overtraining syndrome. Dr. Foster also helps highlight the difference between functional & non-functional over-reaching within your running, along with the differences in symptoms. Carl also does an excellent job at explaining the course of treatment and even prevention strategies. This was an entertaining interview as Dr. Foster's passion on the topic takes us through historic stories and interesting facts all about our current understanding of overtraining syndrome. If you would like to reach out to Dr. Carl Foster you can do so at cfoster@uwlax.edu Click here to find the Run Smarter App on IOS or Android You can also support the podcast for $5AUD per month and interact with the podcast on a deeper level by visiting our patreon page You can also click here for our smarter runner facebook group
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On today's episode, overtraining syndrome and recovery with Dr. Karl Foster. Welcome to the Run Smarter podcast. The podcast helping you overcome your current and future running injuries by educating and transforming you into a healthier, stronger, smarter runner. If you're like me, running is life. But more often than not, injuries disrupt this lifestyle. And once you are injured, you're looking for answers. And met with bad advice and- conflicting messages circulating the running community. The world shouldn't be like this. You deserve to run injury free and have access to the right information. That's why I've made it my mission, to bring clarity and control to every runner. My name is Brodie Sharp. I am a physiotherapist, a former chronic injury sufferer, and your podcast host. I am excited that you have found this podcast and by default become the Run Smarter Scholar. So let's work together to overcome your injury, restore your confidence and start spreading the right information back into your running community. So let's begin today's lesson. you are excited to continue this journey of recovery month. Dr. Carl Foster is following two heavyweights with Shona Halston and Kristi Aschwandan. And yeah, he was super exciting. I had, we're going to chat today all around overtraining syndrome and he was so easy to interview because first of all, he's a talker and secondly, he just loves telling stories around overtraining syndrome. It's almost like I was reading a book when I was interviewing him. He is... let me get my paper. I'm actually standing, I'm usually sitting, but I'm managing hamstring tendinopathy at the moment, so doing my post-editing and standing. Let me just grab my paper. So, Dr. Carl Foster is... he is a exercise physiologist in the Department of Exercise and Sports Science. He has, get this... published, he is three papers shy of publishing 500 papers. He said before we started recording, this is his last work year and he has the goal of getting to 500 be a massive achievement. All around clinical physiology, he has been a part of the paper on prevention, diagnosis and treatment of overtraining syndrome, a joint consensus statement, and that's where built a lot of the content for the interview. He was a contributor in Good2Go and reading that book is what actually made me reach out to Dr. Carfoster to talk about overtrain syndrome because this condition, within this name, it's alluding that people are overtraining, but really they could be just under recovering. And that's why I thought it'd be a really nice concept to introduce to you guys during And we ended up doing it in a very entertaining fashion with interviewing Carl. So I think we'll get under underway if I'll probably mention if you haven't already heard the run smarter app is well underway. It people have been reaching out to me saying they're learning so much just after just browsing through a couple of minutes. And it seems like they're easily navigating what they what topics they want to learn more about. It does have my collection of blogs. It has all the collection of all the podcast episodes that are out. And yeah, if you just want to browse through, start learning, start looking at some research, that's what the app's designed for. So if you want to search, run Smarter app, wherever you do download your apps, either Android, iOS, then do so have a, have a play around. In the more tab there are other things like my ebooks. A lot of people are contacting me being like, where can I get your ebook that you mentioned in season one? You can now go to the app and get those ebooks. And the email five day challenge, these are all free, but they do require an email sign up if you do participate in the five day challenge and the, did I say five week challenge before? Five day challenge and the ebooks. So. you do require like submitting your email, but the blogs and the podcast episodes, just like anything else, it's all free. You can access it straight away. I also have paid content on there. So like my paid courses, injury prevention, dealing with certain specific injuries and also increasing or boosting your running performance. There are paid courses on there, which is all like video content, which I'm really excited about, excited to share with you guys. Okay. So that's all from me. Let's bring on Dr. Carl Foster, Dr. Carl Foster. Welcome to the run smarter podcast. Good. I Brody. Can you, uh, maybe just start off with we've got a bit of detail about you, um, in the intro, but before we get started into overtraining syndrome, can you maybe just describe or a brief summary of your academic career and how you got involved in this particular topic? Yeah. I started out. with the intention of running under four minutes in the mile and becoming a physician. That's the two things I went to. Okay, very nice. And I failed at both of them. I lacked a talent in one case and the study discipline in the other. But I had a lot of fun in the process and got a good education. And then just as my undergraduate was ending, I ran into a guy named Jack Daniels. who's well known as a track coach, but he's also a PhD physiologist. Curiously, his first Olympic medal was in Melbourne in 56, in the modern pentathlon, where he got a bronze team medal. Anyway, he was interested in studying runners, and so I moved to study with him, and it was a very serendipitous thing, because we fit well and did some interesting stuff. I went later to work with David Costell, who was well known in terms of the running community for my postdoc. And then I moved later to Milwaukee, which is a very cold place to work in clinical physiology, cardiac rehab. And then by pure accident, we stumbled into the speed skating team. I'm from Texas. which has the same climate as sort of mid Australia. And so when I was a kid, if there was ice outside, your mother kept you inside for the 15 minutes it took to melt. And so somehow I wound up studying speed skaters. And we, at the time, the interest in overtraining syndrome sort of began to emerge because people realized that something was happening. And... The rest of it was sort of serendipity from that. And then I left the clinical world about 20 years ago to teach where I am now at a normal teaching university in La Crosse. Very good. Wow. I think the topic itself with overtraining syndrome actually came to me after, well, during the book, Good to Go, and was coming up with ideas around Recovery Month and the topics I should include and the episodes I should include. And... This sort of made perfect sense. I hadn't thought about doing an over training, uh, overtraining syndrome topic on this podcast. But when it comes to recovery, a lot of people, when they think of overtraining syndrome, they think it's the exercise component of things like they're just working too hard, but a lot of people, um, need to understand that's actually the balance of exercise with recovery. And I do, uh, quote Shona Halston a lot. And she said that there's a belief out there that you can't over train, you can only under recover. And so I thought that was a very nice quote and a very nice way to come into this topic around overtraining syndrome. I delved into some of your papers and they tend to explain this concept of overreaching and the process that's involved with overreaching. So perhaps we can start off getting a, I guess an idea around what the ideal overreaching processes does involve and how someone can become a better runner because of it. Yeah, if I could go back a little bit, the historically the two people that are really important, there was a Canadian guy named Eric Bannister who came up with the first real quantitative way to account for training and the training impulse or TRMP method. And when you do that, if you conceptualize, if you go out for a run, you become fitter, you grow more capillaries, your heart gets stronger, you grow more mitochondria, but you also get tired. So you have fitness and fatigue happening at the same time. And Eric came up with a way of accounting for how these things might influence performance. You know, for example, if you go out and run, 30K after my interview, tomorrow you're going to be slower because that's the long run and you're going to be tired. But if you rest for a few days, then you become faster because the fitness overwhelms the fatigue. At about the same period of time, and this was in the mid 70s, early 80s, a German guy named Manfred Lehmann began to write about what was called athletes would have where they would just lose their ability to compete at the top level and they would say stale and nobody had any idea of what accounted for it. Anyway, so there's this interplay between you have to get tired, you have to press yourself a little bit in training in order to improve. But because athletes are extraordinarily motivated people, they tend to push too hard. That's their natural inclination. And if they get tired and they have a bad workout, their natural inclination outside of saying a few naughty words is to train even harder. And that leads to sort of a cyclic process that is fairly unhappy. Now, the problem with the term overtraining is it's been used both as a condition, I'm overtrained, and also as a verb, I'm overtraining, meaning I'm hardy. training harder than usual. And it's led to a lot of confusion in the area. And so we've sort of tried to get to the term where overtraining syndrome is this, for lack of a better word, it's this illness you get where the term I use is you lose your zoom. You know, whatever you used to be able to do, now you're no longer able to do it and training doesn't make it any better. And if you have a hard day of training or two hard days of training, or a week of hard training, you might call that overreaching. I'm training harder than I'm used to. It's a verb. And your performance might go down transiently, but then if you have a normal two or three or a week long recovery cycle, then you get better. And that's a normal periodization thing that athletes and coaches have been doing for essentially forever. Now there's two types of overreaching. There's one called functional overreaching, which is good. because everybody gets a little tired, their body adapts to it during the resting period and they come out of it better. And so you theoretically get better and better in each cycle that you have. And that's the result you want. There's a non-functional overreaching, which is just really where you overreach either longer or more severely. And that's really all the definition there is to it. There's not a quantitative measure to it. where the process of recovery takes a long time. And it may take such a long time that you begin to lose some of your fitness. So it's sort of a delicate balance you're in. And the problem again is that athletes are very highly motivated. They're willing to train very hard to accomplish a goal. And sometimes they get themselves into these situations where they don't recover very well. And then suddenly after that is, overreaching, there's sort of a magic line that you cross where even when you do recovery training, you don't get any better. In other words, you've lost it. And so you get into what might be called overtraining syndrome, which means that there's nothing physically wrong with you. You can go to the physician and they can do all the evaluation they want, and they can't find anything wrong with you, and yet you can't perform anymore. and you train easily and you try to recover and you don't get better. And it tends to be a season ending kind of problem. And some people it's career ending because again, we don't really know what causes it but it doesn't seem to recover in some people very well. Depending on how you define it because there's no fixed definition, you can say that in serious athletes, 10% of people per year wind up with overtraining syndrome. And probably 50% of serious athletes wind up with it at least once in their high level career. The other bad news is that a guy who's running four hours in the marathon, who's not really a top athlete by anybody's stretch, they're able to get it as much as somebody who's chasing two hours in the marathon. And so it's relative to your performance, you lose... what you had and what you gained and you can't get it back. The problem is it's a diagnosis of exclusion. You don't feel that bad. You're not sick. You don't have the sniffles. You don't have a fever. You just don't feel like you're going when you go out for a run or whatever your event is. And you eventually try to rest and it doesn't get better. And you rest more and it doesn't get better. And you go to the physician and they do some blood work thump and poke on you and they say there's nothing objectively wrong with you. And yet you're, you aren't what you were. You've lost what you had. And you know, to athletes who are very performance oriented and you know, if you're a journalist, if you're a little bit off or if I'm a professor, if I'm a little bit off, nobody notices it very much. But if you're on the track and somebody shoots the gun off and you're 5% off, everybody in the planet knows about it. And so the nature of sport itself wins to be very visible when you get it. And then again, because athletes are these unique people that are motivated to work hard to get us a result, they get frustrated about it. And so what do they do? They train harder. It almost seems like there's kind of like a spectrum of overreaching, like an overreaching spectrum. And earlier in the podcast, like earlier episodes of the podcast, I, uh, introduced this concept of adaptation, like the adaptation sweet spot, the enough, enough load, enough trigger in order for the body to say I've, um, dealt with a certain increase in load. I need to adapt because of it. And I guess this adaptation sweet spot would be what you might consider functional overreaching, like constantly hitting that sweet spot. But then if you continuously overdo it. You're getting to a point where the body takes longer and longer to recover from that. And then if you follow that spectrum to the severe side of things, you then are left with not only is the body taking longer and longer to recover from this trigger, but now it starts heading the opposite direction. Now you're just not adapting at all to your training response. And then you're actually getting worse. The more you, um, start to introduce load. Is that correct? That's precisely, that's exactly how it works. Okay, beautiful. And if you have a good coach who can recognize that, and the function of a coach is to be objective, and if they recognize it, then they can sit you down and say it's time to take a little bit of a rest and then you get better. But in a lot of athletes either their coach doesn't see it or their coach is too motivated, or particularly with adult. what you might say, serious recreational athletes, they're coaching themselves and you're not objective when you're looking at your own performance. And so if you have a single good workout, you think you're ready for the Olympics. If you have a single bad workout, you think you're ready for the old folks home. But again, the natural response to failure is more effort. And that happens in almost any of the professions as well. If you're a physician and you lose a patient, and because you're too sleepy, because you've been on call, you don't go home and go to sleep, you go to the library and read about what it was that caused the problem. If you're a musician and you have a bad concert, because you're tired and on the road and you just are beat up, you don't go to sleep, you go to the studio and practice some more. So it's sort of the disease of acco people. And in athletics, whatever variety of athletics you're in, it's exceedingly obvious when your performance is down. And in fact, the real secret to this came, there's a fellow in Belgium named Romain Meuson, who's been the senior author of both of the good consensus papers that are out there. And I was actually part of the second consensus paper. And... If you read through it, we wrote all this stuff down and it's got big flowery language and it's a bunch of people who should know what they're doing. At the bottom line, we say we don't know what the hell this is, but it's bad. You shouldn't get it. And so, and that's really the state of the art is it's something you don't want to get. For me, the real secret to understanding it came from racehorses in the Netherlands. horses get a phenomenon called off their feed, where they don't eat right, they kick their stalls, they bite their handlers, and they don't run on the track particularly well. And horses is for good performers as they are very fragile, they can get this stuff easily. And so there was a veterinarian in the Netherlands named Huit Brauns, who was working down in the southern part of the Netherlands with a very well-known physiologist, named Harm Kipers. And so they began to try to study race horses with this. And they got this big horsey treadmill where you could run horses till they came off the back of it. And then they started training them and they had a normal day on, day off cycle, which is how you train horses. And they got better on the treadmill. You're supposed to get better when you train. And then they trained harder and they got better, but they're still using this oscillating pattern. Then they trained even harder and they got better, but the curve is beginning to flatten. And finally they got to the point where they said, well, we can't train them any harder on the hard days. Let's train them harder on the easy days. And immediately they deteriorated. They got this syndrome. And again, if I get overtraining syndrome, who cares? My cat cares because my cat loves me and my girlfriend cares because she loves me. nobody else on planet earth cares. I mean, you know, and even if I was a young guy who was a good athlete, if I fail at the Olympics, well, they say, well, tough about that, or you didn't prepare right or something, but nobody really cares. But if horse gets overtraining syndrome or off their feet syndrome, it's, you know, somebody loses a lot of money because horse racing involves money. And so when Herod Brown published his paper, And I'm actually pretty good friends with Harm Kipers, who was his professor. I talked to Harm a little bit and I began to try to say, can I account for this? And I started drawing pictures on the paper and trying to account for it mathematically. Was there a formula? And we came up with the idea that the variation between hard days and easy days within the space of a week was the deal. We wound up calling it monotony. simply because I had a Dutch speed skating coach at the time who couldn't say the word variability. It just doesn't come out of a Dutch mouth. And so I use the word monotony or monotony where it's always hard. And if you have hard days and easy days, you almost can't get over trained. Shawna Halston's quite right is if you manage your recovery right, you'll never get this. The problem is how do you manage your recovery? And we came up with a little quantitative index of monotony, which is just the mean of the daily training within a week divided by the standard deviation, which you can do on any hand calculator. And then we could calculate something called strain, which is sort of the training load times the training monotony. Because again, I'm a 73 year old man. If I go out for my daily walk, I'm not training very hard. So. I could do exactly the same thing every day. But if you're going out one day to run 20 miles and it's very stressful, you gotta have a recovery day to balance that. And if you don't, you wind up getting in trouble. The other thing we found over the years is it's not only training. If you're working really hard, so your sleeping schedule screwed up. If you've got a deadline as a journalist and you're doing 14 hour days. but you still have to have in your mind, you wanna prepare and run a marathon. So you're burning the candle at both ends. If you travel internationally, which is a wonderful thing to do, but it's stressful on the body, those all seem to add to the equation. If you're in a complicated situation in your business or in your house where you don't really rest. And a lot of people, particularly adult athletes, they say, okay, on the weekends, I'll go out and I'll have two really... humongous training days. But then during the week, they've got to go to work, but they don't really take true recovery. And so they never have a time to really just sit back and relax. And again, the problem is that's antithetical to what athletes do because they're accomplishment oriented people. And it's always worked for them that the harder they work, the better they get until you get to a certain point. And then that doesn't work anymore. Now, having said that, My impression is that overtraining syndrome is really common in top level athletes where there's a lot of performance demands and expectations. There's also the same thing in athletes at what I call the performance cusp. You have a schoolboy who goes to university and is going to a higher level of competition, so they have to train harder. Or you have an athlete who's been a good regional level athlete. that if they could just improve by 5%, they'd be a national level athlete. They can improve by 5% more, they'd be an Olympic level athlete, where you can see the prize right in front of your nose. And so you get it sort of seduced to train a little bit harder. And this really came to me, oh, 20 years ago, I'd come up with this plan that was based on the Dutch racehorses and how to quantitate it. So I got the speed skating team fill out some training forms and did my calculations and I showed the data to the coaches. And this was in October, which in the North America, you're coming into the fall, the World Cup for speed skating is just ready to begin. And so the coaches are focusing on doing the last preparations of the year. You know, we've got to get ready to compete because everything else is tapering. And I showed them where they got where they said, look, local ads, why don't we just skip the recovery day this week? Okay, we'll do that coach, of course, we'll do that. And but then every the next week, every last one of them was sick with a cold. And again, one of the simple mark, very, very simple markers is small infections, you know, you get a GI upset, or you get a little cold, and it's not anything consequential. They often seem to come at times when you're training too much. But then again, if you're a top athlete, you probably try to train through it. And the reason you got sick in the first place is maybe you were training a little harder than you can adapt to. And we went and actually tracked how often people got colds and we tried to match that up with this pattern. And every time the product of load and monotony got above a certain range, they had colds. Well, we were able to account for like 86% of respiratory infections. Wow. And again, it's basically it's a winter sport. We have an indoor venue at the place I was at in the US, but that means you're breathing recycled air. So you're breathing everybody else's bugs. And you get really tired because you're training hard. And there's a phenomenon that is debated enormously, but it's called the open window theory. Whereas if, if you encounter a bug, whether or not you get sick is dependent on what's happening on the inside of you. And if you've really worn yourself out, then you seem to be more susceptible to getting these little bugs. And so again, it goes back to D'Shauna's point is if you do recovery right, you can train as hard as you want, you don't get overtraining syndrome. Uh, Kyle, you're making my job very easy because I'm just sitting back and listening to your talk for 10 minutes. And you just keep talking about the whole story of overtraining syndrome is absolutely fascinating. Um, I guess I was going to call the title of this episode, the overtraining syndrome trap, because it almost seems like a trap in a way that if someone starts, if they're performing at a high level and then they start diminishing on performance, it's almost a trap to think that. they're, they need more training when they could be, um, not, like not knowing that they're actually needing to have more time off. They're needing like to enhance their recovery rather than build up their, um, training, but in fact, more training makes it worse. And so there, there might be a little bit of a trap there. Uh, but in saying that, um, I think we might just dive into the, I guess the diagnosis. early like signs of detection kind of thing. You did say that this overtraining syndrome is, um, a diagnosis of exclusion. Like we've tried all these treatments, nothing's, nothing's work. So it's almost like the, the last thing that could be is this overtraining syndrome. Um, are there any other like, um, questionnaires or like early detection signs, potentially if you're getting sick, like multiple times, it might be that you're. overreaching this non-functional overreaching, but have you seen any early signs or any detection methods that can, um, give us a bit of warning. It varies a little bit. There's no clean data. That's the one thing that's true, but if you're not sleeping well, if you're having bad workouts, if you've been doing a certain training load and that you just can't do that workout anymore. Again, the normal knee jerk response in athletes and in many coaches is, well, you need to work harder. Well, that's probably exactly the wrong thing you need to do. You need to take a day off. You need to, in other words, change your periodization cycle to go from a longer period with a heavier periodization to a lighter period. And everybody says, well, I'm gonna grow more slowly. Yeah, you're gonna grow more slowly, but at least you're growing. And the whole point of training is you should have progression. From early season to late season, you ought to be getting better. And if you're not getting better, I mean, it's possible you're not training hard, but how many athletes have you ever met in your life who aren't training hard enough, who don't want it badly enough? I mean, I've never met one. I've met a few people who were... maybe just didn't want it to begin with, but they never trained hard. And those folks never got over training syndrome. They just didn't train hard enough. But the people that are training hard and you ask them, how does it feel? And they say, I'm knackered. I think that's the word you use in Australia. And here, when I was young, I was trying to be a runner and we would use the term, I feel like death warmed over, which is, I feel like death. And then I... I put it in the refrigerator and I warmed it up again on the stove. And, um, if you're like that, where you're not progressing, then you got to really be asking the question, am I pushing too hard? And again, it's a calculated risk because if I'm, if I have the prize in front of me, if I say, okay, I'm an Olympic athlete, and if I have a great year in preparation, I can be on the podium, being on the podium is inordinately important. people who are paying for it, the Olympic committees. It's really important to your sponsors. And so you're sort of seduced to try, okay, I'll train harder than I've ever trained. And again, the problem is then you begin to give away your recovery days. I mean, every coach, every athlete has a rhythm to their training. And the hard days are probably go ahead and do the hard day and do what you wanna do. Sean is right. But when you start saying, okay, the easy day, And you say, what's my job on the easy day? Is to prepare for tomorrow. If I don't prepare for tomorrow, then I can't do today's workout. One of the most, I think influential studies I ever did, we were in 1991, we were in Calgary, Canada with the US team trying to get ready for the 92 Winter Olympics. And we had a Polish coach, a guy named Stan Klockowski. who had a very unusual idiom. He was always making something. One time I went to him and said, Stan, can you show me how to skate better? Because, you know, maybe I'd understand the sport better. Said Foster, you too old and you too fat to skate, but we make special program for you. So, and I skated better with his new program. I still was horrible, but I skated better. Well, one day he said, we're gonna have a recovery day. We're gonna run 40 minutes. and Stan and Carl are gonna run with you. And so we'll work up with 50 year old guys. So, you know, that's gonna be an easy day for the athletes. Well, of course they all disappear. They zoom away from us. They get back to the stretching area and they're saying, Stan, we're tired. We need a day off. We need recovery. We're gonna get over trained. Stan says, if you makes recovery, when I gives recovery, you not want stays off. That was one of those times you hit yourself in the head and say, this is brilliant. I went back and got some local athletes that I could, you know, hang around with longer, and I asked them to rate their workout. And I have a scale for, you know, rating how hard you're working. But then I asked the coach of that group of athletes to rate what they intended for them to do. Well, on the medium days, the athletes and the coaches had pretty good correspondence. But on the easy days, the athletes always did more than the coach intended. which meant on the hard days and the biology as you've got to disturb homeostasis, you gotta make your body stirred up to make it adapt. They couldn't go hard enough to really adapt themselves. And we've gone back and I've done the same experiment four different times here with different groups of athletes. It's been done around the world with other groups of athletes. And the single common finding is if you assume the coach is right and the coach has a plan. the athlete, if they miss executed, miss executes it by training too hard on these easy days. And so you almost need your technology to say, you know, you gotta be sleeping more today. You gotta have your heart rate down today. You gotta have the number of steps down today because on the hard day, that's the day we're gonna make your body improve. If you're too tired from not recovering, then you can't do these workouts. And so you become really good at performing at a medium level. And nobody gives you a pro contract or nobody gives you a gold medal for being, uh, let's say a miler who runs, uh, 338. You don't get a, in the 1500 meters, you don't get a medal for that. If you're a 225 marathon runner, you don't get a medal for that. You know, you, you gotta be running two hours in the marathon or, or something. But to do that. the hard days have to be really, really challenging, but then the recovery days haven't. And the mistake is, we've seen it in the literature dozens of times, is the athletes make the mistake down here. Yeah. But again, it came from a coach saying to an athlete who was mouthing off, well, if you recover when I tell you to recover, you won't be complaining. I think- So I think coaches have it right. I think the athletes just aren't listening. Yeah. We have introduced that concept of like that gray area where people do train too hard on their, their easy days. And it's something that like it's true in this overtraining syndrome, but it's also true for a recreational runner preparing for a marathon or just wanting to get a better 10 K time trial. They like that understanding that concept is beneficial. I've discussed it on previous episodes, but it's worth repeating. that well-designed program of recovering on your recovery days and going really easy on those really easy days just allows you to perform on your performance days when you do really need to kick in that upper gear or get into the top like couple of percent of your performance. So very interesting to highlight that. Back to the kind of like the early signs of detection. I want to pick your brain a little bit. I think it was one of the papers that consensus that you participate in. I think they mentioned heart rate variability as like a theory that's out there at the moment, but I guess the data, there's no data out there to show it just yet, but it just exists in theory. Can you have anything to add about that? Everybody wants it to be true. And people have been looking for, they were looking for blood tests for a long period of time to see if you could do things with that. They've looked at heart rate variability and there's some tantalizing stuff, but these again are very hard trials to do because athletes are like. The American expression is hurting cats. I mean, it's, you know, to get athletes to do what you want them to do ahead of time is really a hard thing to do. So if you're trying to control them and say, well, I'm purposely gonna push you guys a little too hard and you guys, I'm gonna keep on the program. A, I'm not sure that's ethical and B, will the athletes execute what you're asking them to do? So everybody wants it to be true and everybody wants there to be a simple marker. One of the simple things we've tried to do is you ask how athletes are feeling, and you hate to be that subjective about it. There's a guy in Norway named Steven Seiler, who's a really, really bright guy, who's worked with a variety of athletes, and he was the one that came up with sort of the 80-20 endurance training plan. That's his creation. Well, one time he was working with some Dutch speed skaters, He was hanging out with him for a couple of weeks. And so in the morning, everybody would come down to the, to the place where he eat for breakfast. And there was this one guy who was just obviously not adapting to training. And he had his hair in his cereal. And he had quite long hair. And you know, normally you're at breakfast, you begin to wake up, you have a cup of coffee, you talk to people. And he was just sitting there like this, just with his hair falling down. So... He has the hair in the cereal syndrome. And so a lot of it's behavioral. And the same coach that I was working with, Dutch coach I was working with, a guy named Gerard Kempkers, he was the one that couldn't say variability, so I had to say monotony. And he, I was talking to him about it and he just put his hand in front of their face and said, if you look him in the eyes, you always know. But he was an elite coach. who had like eight athletes to take care of. You can look eight athletes in the face every morning and figure it out. But if you're, let's say you're the coach of a footy club that's at the second level in Australia and you've got, how many players do they carry on the roster, 40 or something like that? Yeah, a little bit less, but yeah, a lot. And the second level players are moving up and players are moving down. And so a given coach may not know an athlete particularly well. And then, so you look at athletes on the face and some of them look fine and some of them are acting like they look fine. And so you miss it and you have a program, but this one guy is being killed by the program. You need to give him a day off. But in a team sport, can you even do that culturally? Can you say, okay, you know, you get to take the day off because you're a weakling, but you're really good on Saturday, so we're gonna let you play. And that's not gonna work. But if you get somebody who's weak, are too young, you know, has an adapter hasn't grown yet. Then you can get them into the syndrome and then they just never become good. They never live up to their promise. Or was that they didn't have the talent to go to the top or did the structure destroy them on the way up? Because I mean, it's easy to talk about this in the pursuit sports running, cycling, swimming, speed skating, because performance is so quantitative. But what do you do with a guy who's playing league? You gotta play with the team, you gotta do what is done. But if he's falling a little bit short, all you can say is, well, you're not making your tackles when you're supposed to, or you're not on the field where you're supposed to be. Is that overturning syndrome, or is it lack of talent, or is it lack of coaching? We don't know, but there's a good chance that a lot of athletes get tired like. You've picked a, um, a very puzzling topic with, uh, cause like, how do you know? How do you know if it's a training, if it's a lack of talent, if it's a, just a, a poor career like path and poor structure, but the, I guess this is, would be a nice segue into the treatment and prevention side of things. And if we go back to the spectrum that I discussed at the start where, you know, the further down the spectrum, you go, the harder and harder the bodies. the longest taking to recover and then, you know, the, you're no longer adapting to stimulus or to a training load. I guess when it comes to recovery, we've sort of mentioned the further that spectrum you are, or in the early days, you can just enhance your recovery, just focus on a well-designed training program. And then the more severe it gets, we just need to enhance recovery. And like you said, um, change up the, the periodization and kind of make sure we kickstart the athlete into a better, well-designed program. But if we get even more severe in that spectrum into the realm of overtrained syndrome, if they are a young athlete and we've identified it, it's an ideal world and we're like, we don't continue pushing that athlete. And I guess the diagnosis is correct and they're still young, they've got a good career ahead of them. What do we do for them? Well, you push them away to where they're not buried deeply in it and say, look, you got to go do something else for a while. And it's the hardest thing to do. And if the athlete had a broken leg, it'd be easy that have a cast on their leg and they could do their activity. And so that's really easy. But if you got overtraining syndrome, there's nothing objectively wrong with you. You're just a jerk. So athletes don't want to do that. The culture is, well, There's nothing wrong with me. I ought to be out there, but you, you got to push them away and say, no, you've got to go to get where you feel better. And the problem is it's like a broken leg. It's a season ending injury. You know, you got to say, okay, this is six or eight weeks where you've got to go really easy and then if you feel good, we'll give it a try. If you don't feel good, then we go back and do six or eight weeks. And they say, but coach, the championships is up here. I'm sorry. You're not going to the championships, not this year. And then the other thing that goes with that is a lot of the really great athletes are these people who are these little, in the States you call them training donkeys, where they could just absorb any amount of training you can do. And they're people that are quite fragile and can't do as much training, even if they're quite good. And so a coach has to learn how to manage the person, or the athlete has to learn how to manage it themselves to say, well, I'm gonna take a day off. by sanity and everybody looks at him like, what are you doing? Well, they're being smart is probably because they know they're failing. But again, you got this cultural thing where from the time you were a kid, the harder you worked, the better you got. I mean, that's the trap of being an athlete. But once you get to a certain point that doesn't necessarily work for you. in the, there's a lot of work being done probably more in Europe than in the States. But particularly with youth athletes is to say you never have a, you never let them specialize until there may be 16 years of age. And so even if you got somebody who's a marvelous football player, you say, okay, you know, football season's over, you got to go do something else. You run or you swim or you lift weights or you do something and get away from football for a while. And then when that season's over, you go do something else. Because the ultimate progression of an athlete is gonna be better, the later you force them to specialize, the better they're gonna be ultimately. But then you also gotta find which ones can absorb work and which ones can't. In the US, for example, when I first started working with speed skaters, there was a fellow named Eric Hayden who was skating. He won every single race there was to have in the 1980 Olympics. won five gold medals. If they'd had more races, I think he would have won them, but they only had five races and he'd been world champion for a couple of times before that he was completely dominant. Uh, Eric, you just could not get him tired. They would make a workout that would destroy everybody. They come back to the house, take a shower and he come out and say, anybody interested in playing tennis? I mean, he was just recovered. And the next day, when everybody else was dying, He was fully recovered. Now, Eric's an orthopedic surgeon now. He's a smart guy. He raced bikes professionally after he won his Olympic medals. But he's now like a 55 year old guy and he could probably make the US speed skating team next year because he's just one of those unbelievably robust human beings that can absorb any amount of work. Well, then you say, everybody else says, well, if Haydn does this, and Haydn wins, if I do this, I'm gonna win. There's a logical fallacy there, you're not Eric Haydn. And then the problem, he also had a coach, a lady who was really driven and really into the first hard training that people started to do in the 1970s. And so she wound up inheriting this kid who you couldn't make too tired. I mean, overtraining syndrome was... a non sequitur for him. But for a lot of the other speed skaters, they wound up trying to do Eric's workouts and it just wasn't gonna happen. And there's all sorts of examples of, you know, really top athletes that it doesn't matter how hard you train them, they just seem to absorb it. In the States most recently, Michael Phelps, a swimmer, who won a whole lot of gold medals. He could just absorb training and there was no problem with you know, being the first guy there and the last guy to leave, he recovered every day. And so those people may be a functionally immune to this kind of problem. But for the rest of people, you got to find the, you got to find the balance. I'll say this, the guy who was my professor, this guy named Jack Daniels, who's better known as a running coach than as a physiologist, but he's a good physiologist. The last year I was in Texas, he had a young runner, a guy named Fred Cooper, who could run four minutes of the mile, which at that time in colleges was a quite good performance. But he was really fragile guy. But if he was with you with 300 meters to go, he was never going to lose. Your only ability to ever beat him was to get away from him. But if he trained more than about three days a week, he just got hurt. And so Daniels had the Cooper rule. He said, I want you there on I want you there on Monday and Wednesday to train. If I see you at the track or if I see you out jogging around the city, I'm gonna kick you off the team." So he was literally running three days a week. He wasn't even doing recovery mile. His recovery was to go to the library and study. And yet he was winning the local championships. And you say, well, if he could train harder, he would be better. You know, he would have been, but he wouldn't have been running because he would have been in a cast with the, the top athletes, like you say, the Phelps of the world, do you just put that as like a genetic outlier or just like genetically gifted, is there any answers for them? No, I think they're just, uh, the people that God touched and made them special. Today, um, did the Diego Maradona died? Uh, and you know, he's I don't know if he's the best soccer player ever, but there's a pretty short list around him. And Diego probably did everything wrong you could do. I think he partied as much as he trained, but he was just special. He was different. So whatever happened, he was gonna perform at a high level. And if you recognize that, then you say, okay, I'm gonna train these guys and I'm gonna get really outstanding performances. But... those people are probably what would have been good under any circumstances. So, if you go back in the history of Australia, there was a runner you guys had named Herb Elliott. He won the 1960 1500 meters, he was a great miler. Well, he was great because he hooked up with Percy Cerrity, who was this sort of legendary weird coach that trained people really, really hard. Well, Elliot thrived under that. But other people who were in the same trading group did not necessarily thrive because it was too much for him. And so, if you find these really remarkable people, that's fine, they don't get over training syndrome. But then what happens to them, say, late in their career? There's a good example in the US, there was a guy named Jim Ryan. who for many years held a mile in 1500 meter world records. He became a silver medalist in 1968 behind Kipchoge Kano in what I think is the best race ever run. But he competed for a few more years after that. And really the last year he competed, he was running the mile in 410, 415. he would start with the group and he just couldn't go. Now we didn't have a word for overtraining syndrome then, but he had lost his zoom. I mean, this was a guy who could run, I think his fastest performance was 351 in the mile and 333 in the 1500. I mean, that's for contemporary times, he was ahead of the world. And yet by the end of his career on normal, on what he said was normal training, he was running the mile on 410 or 415. which is not even a good time for a schoolboy. And so, and he said the only thing he can think is he was in the university and he was doing more stuff and life was just harder and he lost his zoom. And yet if he trained easier, he couldn't perform. So that's the pickle you're in. And then what's the knee jerk response that he's gonna have? I've always trained harder and I get better. I guess it depends on the individual. Like you have to try a couple of different things, especially from like a recreational perspective. Don't compare yourself to others, compare yourself to you and how you bounce back from, or how you respond to recovery, how you bounce back from hard sessions. Yeah. Now the other thing that coaches do not do enough now, but if you go back into the history, into the 1950s, when Roger Bannister first broke the mile in four minutes, His coach was a guy named Fran Stamfeld who later came to Australia and coached John Landy. And I think even coached, who was the guy, Roger Dobell, who won the 800 meters in Mexico City in 68. I think Fran Stamfeld was his coach. Well, he had what he called index workouts. And in those days, everybody ran intervals all the time. But for example, if you're going to run a set of repeat 400 meters, and you're going to run on, let's say, on a three-minute sendoff, and you go and you say, OK, early in the year, maybe Bannister would run 67 seconds. The next month, he'd run 66. The next month, he'd run 65. And across the training year, he would try to go better progression. That's the whole point of good sport. And then he got down to where he was running about 61 and a half and just couldn't go any better. And, uh, Fran Stanfield being a very, very smart guy said, Hey boys, I want you to go to Wales and I want you to hike for two weeks, get away from the track. Don't do a running workout. Just go to Wales and have a holiday and, uh, hike around and have a beer or two. Well, Bannister came back and suddenly he starts running 60 seconds for the for his repeats. And two weeks later, he breaks the four minute mile. And so I, and coaches don't do these index workouts as often as I think they ought to do. In other words, it's boring to do the same bloody workout every week, but if you get better, why are you out there? You're out there to get better. And so it doesn't have to be every workouts under pressure, but one workout a week, one workout every two weeks should be the same workout under the same conditions. And it worked for Bannister and he was training in England on a cinder track in the winter. And the weather in England is miserable in the winter. Cinder tracks if they're wet are miserable. And yet he was still doing these progressive get better every month index workouts. And so if you go and do, okay, I'm gonna do this workout every week or every other week, one nasty, mean, ugly workout every week. And if I stop getting better, Why am I not getting better? It's really hot. Okay, it's hot. The wind is blowing. Okay, the wind's blowing. But if you can do it under the same conditions and you start going this way, something's wrong. And the simplest thing is wrong is your body's beginning to say, I need more recovery. In which case you ought to call up Shana Halston, who's a very nice lady, who dreams up all these recovery strategies. And what's the big purpose of the recovery strategies is to make you do something that's really specific to not do anything. In words, it's like you put on a heart rate monitor and say, I don't want your heart rate above 110 today. But coach, I got to walk to do that. Well, fine, go for a walk. What's your job today? Your job today is to get ready for tomorrow. Yeah. And if you don't do your job today, then you can't do your job tomorrow when we're gonna try to make you better. Very good. I had a lot of, um, listener questions at the start of the month that I had, uh, I was allocating to certain episodes. And because our interview was a bit last minute, we've only just planned this last couple of days, I, um, allocated it, Melinda's question. And she asks, um, should I be consistently getting a certain amount of sleep every night? Or should I try to get more sleep after my hard and long sessions? Good question. What do you, what do you think? There's not hard evidence. If there is evidence, then Shana Halston has it because she's the top person in the world on recovery. But you can say as a general principle, athletic people don't sleep enough. Whether you're a student or whether you're an adult with a job and a family, you're trying to fit training into that kind of thing. Most people don't sleep enough. And so the more you can sleep as a general principle, the better. The general rule here is if you can get 10 hours of sleep a night, then you're doing a good job of it. But who in the world's got 10 hours to sleep and have a normal life? Whether you're a student or whether you're a, I'm 73 years old and semi-retired and I can't get 10 hours of sleep a night. And so that's hard to do. Certainly after your hard days, you need it because what's your job that night is to recover. What's your job the next day is to recover. And so sleeps the best recovery medicine we've got. Uh, but as a general rule, whatever you're sleeping, uh, add an hour or two to that, you'll be better off as an athlete. Yeah. I think that's a nice summary. How you accomplish that. I do not know. Yeah. People have lives and it's kind of tough. Okay. Very good. I think, um, when it comes to, it's not just as simple as yes, after a hard training session, we need to like focus on our recovery, but I think you can take a bit of a, um, a bird's eye view approach of like your weekly sleeping hours and see if you can enhance that. If you can add an hour or two here or there, even if it's on your recovery days, the more sleep that you get, the more you're better. You're going to absorb load for future sessions. And so it might not necessarily be as simple as long sleep after a long session. It might just be like, just try and sleep as much as you can. If you do have that luxury and your, your body's going to recover and bounce back, um, even on your easy days, just over the course of a week, over the course of a month, you're going to be a more resilient athlete and absorb more load, um, if you do enhance your sleep, I guess, would you agree with that? Yeah, and certainly the other thing we know about sleep hygiene is you got to turn the screens off, in words, you watch the television, your brain is getting something that makes you not sleep, you have yours, your nice little cell phone, which you Facebook and do whatever else you're doing. Guilty. You don't sleep as well. And so they've done some, I can't say I've seen them published, but I've heard them reported where they've tried to do studies with particularly collegiate athletes in the US. And particularly what's coming to mind right now is basketball, which is an important university sport here. But they're playing a couple of games a week, which often involve travel. And then they have a student load and students have weird schedules anyway. But there's so many things you can do with your cell phone to entertain yourself or to talk to your friends on Zoom or whatever else. but your brain's not being prepared to sleep. And so the biggest trick is you say, it comes eight o'clock at night, turn all the electronics off. If you're bored, read a book. That's hard to tell people to do who are 18 years old, but if you do that, then when sleep time comes, you go to sleep. But if you're fooling with your phone till midnight, then your body doesn't wanna sleep till two. but you got an early class in the morning. So you wind the place where all this gives is your sleep gets shorter, which means your body doesn't recover. And in something like basketball, it's like any of the big team sports, you've got a long season, the long preparation time, there's a lot of games, it stretches out for months. And then on top of that, you're trying to fit a life around it because they've got studies and whatever. So, um, uh, turn the phone off. Yeah. Turn the computer off, but that's the hardest thing in the world to do. Yeah. And as we wrap up today's episode, are there any kind of final takeaways that you'd like a recreational runner to know that we haven't necessarily discussed on the episode? Well, the big trick is you're not getting better. It ain't because you're not trying. It's probably because you're pushing too hard, particularly if there's a goal in front of you. You say, if I train hard and have a good result, I can get here or I can get here or I can get here. And then number two is I really think the index workouts, even if it's only every other week, do one if you're not getting better, you gotta ask yourself, why am I not getting better? I mean, there's three possibilities. I'm at my limit. I'm not training hard enough. I'm training too hard. Well, there's only one that's good that can be fixed and that's done, not training hard enough. And I've never met the athlete who's not doing that. Yeah. And sometimes the magic bullet can be a bit counterintuitive to take some time off or go do something else, go for a hike and, um, take your mind off what that end goal, what you're focusing on. That's extremely counterintuitive for a lot of people, but sometimes can be that magic bullet. And I guess the last thing I'd say is you work as hard on your recovery days and recovering. as you work on your hard days to make yourself better. Because if you don't do this on the recovery days, you won't be able to do that. We've done that experiment half a dozen times in my own lab and it's been done around the world. And that's the single place where most athletes make a mistake. Yeah, very good. And if I would just to reiterate another takeaway that's already been discussed, it might be to everyone has their own individual abilities to recover. Like you can, you can't compare yourself to another athlete and how they're responding to training and that worked for them. So let me train, let me work that hard. Cause you might just be extremely different with different genetics and you could actually thrive as a runner with two or three hard sessions per week, and then just doing, um, not running on any other, on those other days. So I think maybe a trial and error, if you are noticing a plateau or a definitely a benefit. And I do know that mainly the, the people that listen to this podcast are recreational runners and overtraining syndrome might be extremely rare in that population, but they're still preparing for marathons. They're still, they're still running ultras there. They still put themselves through a lot of load and even just like when we're talking about that spectrum, they might just be somewhere on that. In the mild case of that spectrum, but just appreciating the Um, benefits of recovery and the benefits of a well-structured plan. Um, this whole entire topic can be extremely beneficial for them. Yeah, certainly. So this, this has probably been my easiest interview to do, because I just let you do your thing and let you tell these really engaging, informative stories and pretty much tell us like the Genesis and the story of overtraining syndrome. It's been a pleasure and it's been, like I said, very easy on my behalf. So, um, Once again, thank you for coming on to the Run Smarter podcast. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Run Smarter podcast. I hope you can see the impact this content has on your future running. If you appreciate the mission this podcast is creating, it would mean a lot to me. If you submit a rating and review, if you want to continue expanding your knowledge, please subscribe to the podcast and get instant notifications when a new episode comes out. If you want to learn quicker, then join our Facebook group by searching the podcast title. If you want to take your learning to the next step, including injury prevention principles, injury specific insights and modules to boost your running performance, then head to our website by searching runsmarter.online and jump into our Run Smarter Online course. Once again, thank you for listening and becoming a Run Smarter Scholar and remember, knowledge is power.